System Mechanic - Clean, repair, protect, and speed up your PC!Pope John XXIII
Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was born in 1881, the third of thirteen children in a peasant family in Sotto il Monte, near Bergamo. The family was "so poor the children had no wine." "There are three ways of ruining oneself -- women, gambling and farming. My father chose the most boring."
Angelino was a bright boy and was sponsored for an education at the Bergamo seminary, which carried out a severe religious training. When Roncalli was ordained, in 1904, the Church was fearful and inward-looking. In 1871, with the loss of the papal states to the modern nation of Italy and the restriction of Vatican sovereignty to its current borders, Pope Pius IX had proclaimed himself a "prisoner of the Vatican" and taken a defensive stance toward the modern world. In his decree Non expedit, he had forbidden Italy's Catholics from taking any part in national politics. Pope Pius X (reigned 1903 - 1914) took this isolating trend further by undertaking a purge of "Modernists", especially biblical scholars who used modern textual criticism, driving many intellectuals from the Church.
Roncalli's first assignment as a priest was as secretary to the new Bishop of Bergamo, Giacomo Radini-Tedeschi. Bishop Radini-Tedeschi was a reformer who sought to re-involve the Church in the world. He was staunchly pro-labor, and founded organizations for working women (with his able secretary at the head) and sided with the union during a local iron-worker's strike. The elegant aristocratic bishop and his rotund peasant secretary were inseparable for ten years. In August of 1915 it was discovered that Radini-Tedeschi had cancer, and he was told that he did not have much longer to live. Within a few months his beloved Radini-Tedeschi died, Pope Pius X died (to be succeeded by Benedict XV), and Italy declared war on Austria and Germany, entering World War I. Roncalli was called up to serve in the medical corps. He put on the army uniform and, in what he later described as "a moment of weakness on my part", grew himself a fat bristly moustache. After the war he had a variety of assignments, including teaching patristics at the Pontifical Athenaeum of the Lateran. Something went wrong here; after only three months he was relieved of his post, consecrated a bishop, and sent as papal emissary to Bulgaria. His brilliant career was over.
Bulgaria is a mostly Orthodox country with a small minority of Catholics; the Vatican hadn't felt it necessary to send an emissary there in six hundred years. Roncalli's life there was difficult. He made dozens of recommendations that were never followed and spent months trying to found a seminary which would never be built. The one recommendation that the Pope followed, to appoint a Bulgarian as exarch for the Byzantine-rite Catholics, left Roncalli with no pastoral duties to perform. After ten years of frustration in Bulgaria, Roncalli got a new assignment, as delegate to Turkey, another long-neglected outpost. He was there when World War II broke out, and he devoted himself to the care of refugees, especially Jews. He obtained transit visas to Palestine for some; to others he issued baptismal certificates that would enable them to pass as Christians, with the understanding that no baptisms need be performed. Chaim Barlas of the Jewish Agency's Rescue Committee wrote: "to the few heroic deeds which were performed to rescue Jews belong the activities of the apostolic delegate, Monsignor Roncalli, who worked indefatigably on their behalf." Rabbi Isaac Herzog of Jerusalem wrote: "Through [Roncalli] thousands of Jews were rescued."
The end of World War II turned Roncalli's career around. The papal nuncio to France, Valerio Valeri, had collaborated with the Vichy government, and De Gaulle insisted that Valeri must go. The Vatican had to find a suitable replacement, and fast; if they didn't send a new nuncio in time for the traditional New Year's greeting to the President, the greeting would be given by the next-highest ranking ambassador, Aleksandr Bogomilov of the Soviet Union. Suddenly Roncalli's very obscurity was an advantage; no-one knew of anything to object to in him. He was appointed nuncio to France in 1945.
In 1953 Roncalli was made a cardinal and appointed patriarch of Venice. Pope Pius XII died on October 9, 1958, and the conclave began two weeks later. Roncalli was elected on the twelfth ballot, taking the name John XXIII. It was rumoured that the top choice was really Giovanni Battista Montini; but he was considered unelectable because he was not yet a cardinal (John made Montini a cardinal immediately after becoming Pope.) Many believed that John had been elected as a papa di passagio, a transitional pope. He was seventy-seven years old. He looked up his file at the Holy Office (charged with guarding against heresy) and there was a note attached to it: "suspected of Modernism." This is why his career had been ruined thirty years before.
Pope John called the Second Vatican Council to achieve the aggiornamento "updating") of the Church. The first session of the Council dealt with liturgical reform and voted to allow Mass to be said in the vernacular; and proposed a reactionary, divisive schema defining the sources of revelation. When the schema was rejected by slightly less than the needed two-thirds majority of the bishops, John intervened personally to order a new commission to redraft it. By the end of the first session, he was dying of stomach cancer.
On November 27, 1961, he suffered a massive intestinal hemorrhage. The Vatican press office issued a report that he had a bad cold; rumours flew around Rome that he was already dead. But he rallied, and his tough peasant constitution enabled him to survive another six months. Pope John XXIII died June 3, 1963. He was 81. He was succeeded by Cardinal Montini, who took the name Paul VI and supervised the completion of the Second Vatican Council, in 1965.
